"When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso." -Pablo Picasso

"Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." -Teddy Roosevelt, while surviving an assassination attempt. He finished delivering the 90-minute speech.

Never in my life have I encountered a fanbase that is so rabidly obsessed with everyone knowing more than common knowledge about the subject of their fandom. I've had people ask me for opinions on saddles, riding crops, and... well I can't even name the other parts because I don't even know what they were. In every instance, my response is, "I don't know anything about that" and their reply is, "OMG you DONT know that the French Russian Polynesian riding saddle is better for show riding than the East Southwestern Modified Face Beans Pants Loaf saddle?!?! How did you not know that?!"

I swear, they share more pictures of their horses than new parents share of their babies. "Isn't he so cute?! Look at this one!!" It's a horse. Horses have never had the kind of universal cuteness of a puppy, baby, kitten, or other animals. Yet I swear, it's ten times more pictures of ten times fewer activities/differences.

I once had a friend that was always trying to ask me for opinions of random horse-related crap and always showing pictures of her favorite horses (not even horses she owned, just horses she randomly found pictures of on the internet). I'm talking every singleday. I once tried to explain to her why it was boring to me by sending her links to two different kinds of CPUs asking for her opinion on them. "Why the hell would I care? Oh, hey, which of these saddle girths do you think would be most comfortable?"

I walked in on my (dorm) roommate jacking off with a picture of his sister in a bikini on the screen... it was awkward enough that he paused to actually say, "Wait, no, this isn't as bad as it really looks!" and said he alt+tabbed over to Facebook when he heard me coming in. Then he alt+tabbed back to actual porn... very violent BDSM porn... I'm not sure if that actually made it better or worse.

EDIT: The number of people asking me if the sister was hot is disturbing. Who cares, you sick fucks?

Back before the days of the printing press, the alphabet wasn't quite as standardized as it is today because it was easy for people to learn to hand-write a new symbol, as opposed to the difficulty of manufacturing an all-new printing tile. Usually these were just amalgamations of already-common letters. One such letter was called the Chi Rho: ☧ (appears poorly in unicode, but you've likely seen it in Catholic churches). The Chi Rho was a superimposition of the first two letters of the Greek word for 'Christ' (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ) over one another. Legend has it the symbol was revealed to Constantine, and that upon putting it on the shields of his armies, they were victorious in all their battles. But I digress.

So, for the ancient church, ☧ was the one-character symbol for Jesus Christ. Once it became common to celebrate Jesus's birth every year (in part to push out the Pagan holiday Saturnalia), that celebration was structured as a mass specifically dedicated to celebrating Christ's birth: the Christ's Mass, or ☧ Mass using the common symbol. Over time, the last 'S' and the space were dropped, and it came to be known as simply ☧mas. It was also common for Christians to be referred to as ☧tians or ☧pians, and the movement as a whole as ☧tianity.

Upon the advent of the printing press (although whether the printing press actually played this role is debatable), however, it became necessary to standardize the alphabet more, and thus, the Chi Rho symbol was dropped. Rather than starting to refer to Christ as XP, the custom instead became to refer to Christ simply by the letter Chi, or X (although at this point, language had transitioned to Latin, and that letter was recognized as "ex" rather than "Chi"; still, the tradition of 'X' being the first letter in 'Christ' remained). It thus carried through that the name for the celebration of Jesus' birth came to be known as Xmas.

It wasn't until several years after that development that the entire word started to be spelled phonetically. In a way, one could argue that the more reverent way of phrasing the holiday is actually Xmas, given its roots in the belief that Jesus Christ is sacred enough to deserve reference by one character alone.

(Note: It is partially speculation that the printing press led to the transition from ☧ to X. X had been in use since the early days of the church as well, and Xtianity was another early name for the movement. The Chi Rho was in more common usage than simply X, however, until the beginning of the Renaissance, thus leading to the speculation that Chi on its own replaced the Chi Rho because of its easier use in print).

I was leaving a friend's wedding in downtown Atlanta. I parked in a pay lot, and since I was already running late for the wedding, I paid but didn't bother waiting for my receipt. Apparently, in this lot, you had to show your receipt on the dashboard.

So, when I got back to my car, I found it booted. I was pissed. As I was walking back to the pay station to see who to call, a homeless man approached me. Initially I waved him off, assuming he was panhandling, and while I usually try to be gracious, I was already too pissed off to deal with him. He insisted, though, and said that he saw my receipt on the ground. I froze, realizing that he actually had a real reason to talk to me. I stopped and let him continue, and he said he waited around to give it to me. With the receipt, he said, they would remove the boot for free since it proved I had paid, while without the receipt they'd charge me $75 since I couldn't prove it.

So, I took my receipt and called the booting company. They said they'd be out within an hour and asked if I had my receipt. I said yes, and they said okay, then there wouldn't be anything else required. I went back to the man and thanked him, and we started talking. He told me his life story -- his name was Leonard, he had been a concessionaire at the Braves' stadium before a leg injury caused him to lose his job since he couldn't walk up and down the stairs. He needed surgery to repair the leg and couldn't afford it, he was kicked out of his apartment, and ended up on the streets. He said he gathers what money he can to pay the $15/night it costs at the nearby shelter and saves all the rest of it for the eventual surgery. He wants to save up enough money before the surgery to take care of his expenses for six months after, knowing that he won't be able to even panhandle during that time. I was amazed -- he was living his life on the streets at the moment, yet he still had more of a life plan than I, a graduate student in Computing, had.

The crucial thing to mention is that he never, ever asked me for money. Ever. He sat around and chatted with me, asked me questions about computers and my own life, and never once even alluded to any sort of difference in stature between us or my ability to help him. We were equals. No one in the world might have judged us that way, but we were.

When the booting company arrived, they removed my boot for free just as they had said they would. I said thank you to Leonard again and gave him far more money than it would have cost to have the boot removed without a receipt because, frankly, Leonard had earned it. He'd earned it by showing far more humanity and selflessness than anyone else I encounter on a daily basis, despite having a millionth as many reasons to be so gracious. He'd earned it by trying to do a good deed with no motive to earn anything in the first place.

I definitely still think of Leonard. I hope he was able to get his surgery and get his job back. Even more, though, I hope he was able to impact others' lives the way he impacted mine. He gave me perspective, he humbled me, and he made me completely rethink massive portions of my prior political views.

EDIT: Someone below asked where this was, so I found the parking lot on Google Maps. It's here.

Popular the next fifteen years: self-driving cars smartcars. That's it, I'm coining a more usable name for them. They're smartcars. Lower-case 's', compound word to differentiate them from the Smart brand. But self-driving cars are henceforth and forevermore called smartcars.

There isn't one -- not at that scale, anyway. Mass protests like this can be interpreted from the perspective of risk and reward: what are you risking, and what might you gain? Ukraine is on the brink of financial collapse, unemployment rates are enormous, quality of living is low. If you're a young adult in Ukraine (as most of the protesters are), you don't have much to lose: the current future is very bleak. But by protesting, you might install a government that will create economic prosperity. Your future is enormously improved. Low risk, high reward. This is the reason why protests are met with violent resistance by governments: to raise the risk. If we assume protesters continue protesting so long as the reward outweighs the risk, then one response is to raise the risk.

In the United States, though, the majority of us are incredibly, incredibly well-off compared to the rest of the world. Even our poor and homeless have standards of living that are comparable to the majority of populations in many underdeveloped countries (note: that's not to say that there aren't still problems or that they should be grateful or any crap like that, just saying a straight comparison reveals the poorest in the US have more than the poorest in most countries). We have routines that we enjoy, we have goods that we would not want to lose, we have lifestyles that might not be our ideal, but that at least are worth preserving.

A protest on the scale of that in the Ukraine involves putting your entire life, routine, lifestyle at risk. What would it take to get you to do something that would mean you can't go home to your apartment, or even your parents' house, at the end of the day? That you can't look forward to a decent meal? That you can't spend an hour playing your favorite game or watching the latest episode of your favorite show? That you can't sleep in your own bed or shower in your own shower? That every element of your routine and lifestyle could be swept away? In America, our baseline is still so high that there's considerable risk in protesting.

The lifestyles we live in America are those that the protesters in Ukraine thirst for. This isn't an "America, fuck yeah!" comment because it isn't something to be proud of: we have very little responsibility for the prosperity we were born into. This is a straight-up comparison of quality of life. The reward for protesters in Ukraine, Venezuela, and other countries is something we presently have.

I've been in and worked at a university for the past ten years or so. To me, the worst examples aren't the incredibly hyper-controlling parents around lower, middle, or high school age. Those parents can be absolutely ridiculous, but when the kid is still living under their roof, I can understand being involved.

For me, the absurd ones are the ones that continue helicoptering once the kid gets to college. A few things I've seen in my years here:

Parents calling professors to complain about their kids' grades or how their kid was graded. I've seen this all the way up to graduate students.

A parent demanding our registrar change their kid's major at their request because, again, "they're paying tuition". This mother demanded that her son be a Biomedical Engineering major instead of a Computer Science major.

Parents sitting in on their kids' classes on the first day, with their kids, and going up to talk to the professor afterward. I mean, I can understand sitting in the back of one of your kid's first really big classes just to get a feeling for what they're going to be doing -- but sitting with them and actually participating? Oh my god.

Fortunately, the law and our school are adamant about this: administrators and professionals are to reply "By law, we cannot discuss this with anyone except the student" to everything. But, half the time that just ticks the parent off even more because, after all, "I'M PAYING TUITION HE'LL TAKE WHAT I WANT HIM TO TAKE."